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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28250586">Between the Well and the Wilderness</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foorocks10/pseuds/Foorocks10'>Foorocks10</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Between the Well and the Wilderness [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fallen London | Echo Bazaar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Judgement!Candles, Other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 01:34:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,050</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28250586</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Foorocks10/pseuds/Foorocks10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>You hear a sad, tired, voice whispering in your ear.<br/><br/><i> Don’t pursue this any further.  Please.  You won’t like the consequences. <i></i></i></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Between the Well and the Wilderness [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069511</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. I Say I’m Crying</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It takes a second to realize you’re still here.  Not dead.  Not <b>eaten</b>. Your body feels strange, loose and detached compared to how it felt when you were a curator or </p><p>-<em> I don’t want to </em>-</p><p>Your mind draws away from the thought like human fingers from flame.</p><p>Do you still have eyes?  Can you open them?  </p><p>
  <em> Breath . . .  </em>
</p><p>Eyes crack open before suddenly widening.  Power pulses, then wanes.  Looking from the outside, seeking gold slowly bleeds out of cloudy grey.</p><p>
  <em> Is this home? </em>
</p><p>No.  It’s too dark down here.  There’s no light, no stars, no Judgements. And the world</p><p>presses</p><p><b>down</b>.</p><p>Are you in the Neath?</p><p>Are you still alive?</p><p>
  <em> Did Veils come back for me? </em>
</p><p>Push the hope down.  You know better.</p><p>Your face twists.  It takes you a second to realize that this is an expression of rage.  Mostly rage, anyways.</p><p><em> You left me.  You betrayed me </em>.</p><p>But you’re not dead, are you?  You feel strange, but there is a . . . presentness to everything.  You must exist in some way.</p><p>It’s dark in here.  Like the Neath was before you started bringing light into it; curators, and humans, and everyone that came after.</p><p>You miss the light.  You don’t want to be alone in the dark.  At first you were confused, but now you’re starting to get scared, just a little.  Something in your mind reaches.  <em> Please, let there be light. </em>   And suddenly, there <span class="u"> is </span>.</p>
<hr/><p>It doesn’t hurt your eyes.  It should, moving from total darkness to this all encompassing light.  This light is wrong.  Not the glow of candles or fires or lamps.  Not the searing power of the Judgements.</p><p>You were floating in a sea of black.  Now you glow in a sea of brilliant white.</p><p>
  <em> Where am I?  What is this place? </em>
</p><p>There is nothing around you.  Just a strange cold light illuminating nothing.</p><p>This isn’t the Neath.  The humans -<em> and your fellows, don’t forget </em>- complained enough about the lack of light.</p><p>
  <em> Veils used to . . .  </em>
</p><p>They would have been ecstatic with strange, cold, hard, light.</p><p>But you can’t be home.  Home never tried to drag you down to the center of the planet.</p><p>You remember what brought the light.  Experimentally, you reach into your mind, think -<em> I don’t want to be held down- </em> and <em> pull </em>. . .</p>
<hr/><p>You feel the strange relief of your bones finally moving from where gravity had pushed them.  It feels . . . wrong.  Like a memory of a feeling, not a true one.  Like something you dreamed about.  Are you really feeling?</p><p>Your mind reels from your train of thought.  You’re not ready yet.</p>
<hr/><p>You wonder what else you could do here, if you willed it.  This is a strange place.</p><p>You could find your friends, ask them for help.  You could . . .</p><p>But they betrayed you, didn’t they?  They sold you to die.</p><p>Not just to die, to be <span class="u">eaten</span>.</p>
<hr/><p>It occurs to you that you haven’t looked at yourself, not once in the time you’ve been in this strange place.  There’s some kind of mental block keeping you from even registering your own claws.</p><p>
  <em> You know it’s a bad idea.  There are some things you cannot know. </em>
</p><p>You force yourself to look down at your flank, the edge of where your wing rests.</p><p>
  <em> It’s not . . . </em>
</p><p>
  <em> I’m not . . . </em>
</p><p>The screaming stops eventually.  Arguably, the crying never will.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. They All Seem So Far Away</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>What’s left of you stays alone in the void.  You can look outside it,  move your focus to see into the Neath and the Wilderness.  You don’t usually.  It hurts too much.</p><hr/><p>Sometimes you trace the streets of the Third City.  <strike>You miss the Second.</strike></p><p>
  <em> Avoiding the wells.  Avoiding the temples.  Don’t think about the stains on the altar, dripping their way down. </em>
</p><p>Listen to the human chatter.  Languages are different, but the rhythm stays the same.</p><p>Leave when the memories overwhelm, when the pain becomes too much.</p><hr/><p>Sometimes you get bored and lonely enough to move your focus on your fellow Masters.  Not fellow.  Not really.  After all, you’ve recently added <em> former </em> to your title.</p><p>No.  They added it for you.  You won’t forget.  If you had teeth, they’d be bared.  Bitterness burns in your veins.</p><p>These visits end as abruptly as they begin.  Betrayal is an open wound.  You wonder if you will ever stop bleeding.</p><hr/><p>Sometimes, you look at the surface, gaze at alien skies, watch the humans go about their business.  It’s strange up here, but there are less memories.  Wherever or whatever you are, Sol can’t touch you.  You don’t think it’s aware that you’re watching.</p><p>
  <em> Do you feel relief?  Are you disappointed? </em>
</p><p>Spread out to bask in the warmth of the Judgement’s gaze -<em> Are you warm?  Really?  Or is it just a memory of warmth?- </em> , blink at the painfully familiar stars and moon - <em> Do you have eyes?  Are you really blinking? </em> -, scream until your voice is gone - <em> None of this is real-. </em>  Feel empty.</p><hr/><p>Fires and Iron mourned you.</p><p>You find them in your lab, where you had coaxed light and warmth out of wire and glass and chemicals and secrets.  It’s strange seeing others down here.  You never had company down here <strike>when you were alive</strike>, at least not the other curators.  If a device or component decided to be temperamental, you wanted a clear path to the exit.</p><p>You frequently collaborated with Fires on light fixtures and more.  Clockworks only.  You’d take the creations down to your lab, to push power into the device.</p><p>There are scorch marks on the walls.  You’ve always been fond of them.  Like <strike>Veils</strike> (the traitor) and its scars, marks of hard work and hard won victory.</p><p>A flash of concern (don’t worry about them, they betrayed you), but Fires and Irons aren’t trying to get themselves killed.</p><p>They’re holding still, waiting in silence.  A human looking in might say they were praying.  They’re not.  They’re <strike>listening</strike> with something more than ears.</p><p><strike>When you were a curator</strike>, you radiated power.  It was easy for you to put it into other things.  Except yourself.  You gave that up.</p><p>
  <em> You remember, in the aftermath of Axile, forcing life into a burned Fluke as you healed the worst of the damage.  Eventually after the worst had passed, when you couldn’t tip the balance between life and death for anyone else, you let go of the power, and collapsed from your own burns. </em>
</p><p>Could you ever heal yourself?  Was it something else you gave up?</p><p>Your arm never worked right again.</p><p>You had to fly slowly, carefully, or you would drift.</p><p>Then you journeyed to the Neath, and the pressure of the word ensured you could never fly again </p><p>-<em> you never flew again- </em></p><p>Breath.  Pull your mind from the memories.  Forget the pain.</p><p>Fires and Iron are listening for you, for your power.  For the special touches you put on everything you worked with, just by living and working and existing.</p><p>The power will never fade.  You do good work, no leaks, no wastage.  The echoes of yourself you leave behind will.</p><p>There’s a faint tremble in Iron’s arms.  Fires sways where it sits.  Your name was erased.  Soon there won’t be anything left.  Do they remember who they mourn for?  Do they know who they’re listening to?</p><p>In your empty heart, you feel an ember of warmth.</p><hr/><p>If you can do anything, control everything in the pocket of space that’s become your prison, you could try to heal yourself.  The burns from (<em> I’m sorry </em> ) Axile, hundreds of small scars from experiments gone wrong, <em> the phantom wounds from . . . </em></p><p>But . . . they’re a part of you.  They’re your history.  You can’t imagine a future where you’re whole.</p><p>What you can do is restrained by your conception of the world around you.  <em> You can’t escape yourself.  You can’t change what you are.  You can’t escape your life. </em>  You can’t escape the deepest grooves in your mind.  All you do is grind deeper.</p><hr/><p>You are bored and lonely and miserable (pathetic), idly changing focus between Earth, the Wilderness, and the Neath, when you catch sight of <strike>Veils</strike> The Traitor and everything is lost to the rage.</p><p>Later, much later, you will force yourself to look with sane eyes.  There had been something crazed in the Vake’s eyes, always, as it basked in human worship, sewed robes (one less now), and studiously ignored the door to a set of rooms (my rooms) -</p><p>But you, as you were in the moment, are rage and hatred and betrayal trapped in a void.  You seethe as the Vake goes about it’s business.</p><p>
  <em> I’ll make sure you suffer like I did. </em>
</p><p>Rage rises and you drown under the tide.  You feel nothing else, you are nothing else.  A star’s power condensed into rage.  It will take you a long time to understand what you did.  Even longer to repeat it.  It doesn’t matter.  You have all the time in the world.</p><p>All you know, in the moment, is the Vake suddenly turns and yelps.  Part of you wants to hear it scream.  Part of you is laughing.  Part of you is curious.  You turn.</p><p>Its workbench is on fire, ordinary in appearance, but growing too quickly and too hungrily to be anything natural.</p><p>The Vake turns, frantically moving to save its work.  You, worn out and spent by emotion, flee back to the void.  For a long time you stare at the empty spaces that used to be your claws and dream of fire.</p><hr/><p>You wonder what happened to your cat.</p><p>You feel empty.  Your name is erased.  The Second City is gone.  Your friends are traitors.  If there’s no one left in the world to miss you, what is there to come back to?</p><p>But . . .</p><p>Fires and Iron stood vigil.  There are humans you remember who sometimes turn to the Bazaar, eyes flickering with irrigo, hands going to their head.  Because there are deep claw marks on the Vake’s hand, too closely spaced to be from a curator.</p><p>Even if he’s dead, he remembered me, he loved me, he fought for me, for my revenge.</p><p>
  <em> If you’re still alive, I’ll keep you safe.   </em>
</p><p>You promise and almost miss the pull of power.  A promise with power behind it.  The only gift you can give it now.  You hope it will be enough.</p><hr/><p>You leave an impression of yourself behind, every time you work your power, even for your most perfect creations.  When you lose concentration, lose yourself in emotion, your intentions can warp.</p><p>You had been betrayed.  You were dying, being murdered, being eaten.  Even hazed by drugs, you tried everything you could to stop it.</p><p>
  <em> What did you do?  What did you create? </em>
</p><p>The humans say there’s a monster living in the well.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. A Color You Have Not Seen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> What is the thing in the well?  Is it you?  Is it what’s left of you?  Is it the real you?  How did it get there? </em>
</p><p>Your head hurts.  </p><hr/><p>It’s an awful, wrenching feeling, being near the well.</p><p>You grit your teeth at the flood of pain and rage and despair and memory to stare down into the dark water.  There’s something staring back.</p><p>They murdered you, ate you, drowned you in lacre, and buried your bones, but you haven’t died yet.  Part of you still remains.  This must be why the light of the Judgements doesn’t burn you.  You think there isn’t enough left of you to truly die.</p><p>Turn.  Stare blankly at the rough stone.</p><p>
  <em> I don’t know what you are.  Are you part of me, something left behind when I- </em>
</p><p>You swallow.  Press closer to the stone.  Are you trembling?  Breath . . .</p><p>
  <em> Are you something I created?  I tried so hard not to die.  I did everything I could to stop what was happening. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Or am I something Candles created, and you what’s left of the real thing? </em>
</p><p>No answer from the well.  Only ragged bubbling breaths, hissing from far below.</p><p>
  <em> Or is Candles dead and buried and we’re both left behind? </em>
</p><p>If you were real, you’d be rubbing the fur off your own forehead.  You press your head deeper into rough stone.  You tremble.</p><p><em> “I don’t know,” </em> you whisper, <em> “I just don’t know” </em></p><p>Your voice echoes down the well.  When it comes back to your ears -<em> you don’t have ears, not really- </em>, you swear there’s a second voice, echoing yours.</p><hr/><p>You fold yourself into a nook between shelves in Pages’ room.  You have no substance, but habit overrules your own sense.  You hold yourself up and out of the way, balance on hand and wing, burns and weakness and defect and all, watching Pages work.</p><p>It mutters to itself, sounding out unfamiliar terms as it looks over a human book? Codex?  You forgot the term.  You thought you had time to learn the Third City and its customs and people.  </p><p>You thought you had time.</p><p>You know Pages will soon have mastery of the strange human language.  It will be creating its own words, playing with grammar and etymology.  You lost patience with it sometimes.  You never enjoy having to parse out every new word, breaking it down to the components.  Sometimes, you just asked the humans for help.  You made friends that way.</p><p>(Didn’t Pages used to read in candlelight?  Where did these lamps come from?)</p><hr/><p>Iron is working with it’s weapons, sorting and arranging.  With a new city comes new weaponry.  Iron will have them all catalogued and sorted, develop new ways to fight and new ways to maintain.  It’s the kind of work you expect the armorer to already have done, but it’s collection of Third City weapons seems strangely incomplete.</p><p>(It can’t bear to touch them)</p><p>You remember the ritual knives.  Back when you <em> or Candles </em> were naive, when you thought they would only take a little, when you just tried to distract yourself from the pain, you remember thinking that Iron would have loved them.</p><p>You try to fight back the flood of memories.  Lose your grip and flee back to the void, where you can rage and grieve until you are spent.</p><p>(You won’t know this, not for a long time, but Iron pauses in its work, pricks its ears, sniffs the air, and is suddenly alert.  Its vigilance prevents Veils from burning to death in its own bed.  </p><p>You laugh when you realize that you got the workbench again.</p><p>When you’re a ghost in the void, you take what you can.)</p><hr/><p>When Candles was alive, it never had human assistants, like Fires and Pages and Irons.</p><p>Candles did have lab partners.  Small hands and flat nails made humans perfect for working with fine materials and machines.  And, if something went wrong, they were small enough to toss out of the way.</p><p>You don’t know what to think about these ‘Seekers of the Name’.</p><p>What they do to themselves.  What they do to others . . .</p><p>Watching them is watching Candles die.  Over and over and over.</p><hr/><p>
  <em> You dream of fire. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> The Third City dreams of fire. </em>
</p><p><em> Your former associates are sick of putting out fires.  They think it’s deliberate.  They wonder why the </em> <em> curator </em> <em> they destroyed so thoroughly won’t sleep. </em></p><p>
  <em> The God Eaters dream of their mouths and throats and stomachs burning with strange blinding golden light.  They burn to charred skeletons every night. </em>
</p><p><em> Remember, </em> the creature in the well/the Seekers/the Void croons, <em> A reckoning will not be postponed forever . . . </em></p><hr/><p>You spend a lot of time in the void, trying to calm the panic, trying to stem the flood of memories.</p><p>You do things in your panic that you never intended to.  You will never fully quantify what you’ve done.</p><p>It makes you sick.  You never liked collateral damage.  It was a sign of lazy planning, it complicated things . . . </p><p>You saw Axile burn in the crossfire of a war the curator could never understand and the Judgement never wanted to.</p><p>Your scars ache.  Your eyes burn.</p><p>Candles was the light on the edge of sleep and the solar storm that strips flesh from bones.  It was never safe.  But Candles was careful.  Candles had won control over power no curator should possess.</p><p>When Candles was new, clumsy in a strange body, its twin watched over it as it learned how to be a curator.  </p><p>A Runt Judgement who gave its power to its twin.</p><p>An abomination of a curator with blinding white fur, born in charity, who carried light in itself.</p><p>But Candles had a sibling.  Then Candles had <strike> friends </strike>.  You have nothing.</p><hr/><p>
  <em> Breath . . . </em>
</p><p>Listen to the thing in the well, raving in hunger.</p><p>Listen to Fires and Iron, stumbling and losing concentration as their minds battle against irrigo.</p><p>Listen every time a human pauses in conversation, trying to remember something buried under the Neathbow.</p><p>Pity the strangled shells of humans who reenact Candles’ murder over and over again.  But . . . they’re trying to bring Candles’ name back.</p><p>It wouldn’t hurt so much, being dead, if people remember who you were, what you did.</p><p>But they drowned your memory in irrigo.  Feel the bitterness rise.  You won’t forget.  You can’t forget.</p><hr/><p>No matter if Wines and Spices battle over your domain, dreams still answer to your call.</p><p>Even as a Judgement, you had some power over the forbidden.  Going against the Chain.  Always, always.  A moth to folly’s candle.</p><p>You have all the time in the world to regain your mastery.</p><hr/><p>
  <em> Candles had dominion over dreams.  Let’s take a peek into the mind of a dreamer. </em>
</p><p>You are dreaming about drowning.  You are dreaming about your home.  Everything you’ve missed is around you again.  You can see the moon begin to rise, full and beautiful and red.  The air doesn’t smell damp anymore.</p><p>The air smells like . . .</p><p>
  <em> Smoke? </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Salt? </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Blood? </em>
</p><p>Your stomach starts to growl.  You start to wonder why.  There’s something strange about this situation.  And you have always had a natural curiosity.</p><p>Something flickers on the edge of your vision.</p><p>It looks like one of the mysterious hooded lords of the city.  It shakes its head at you, not quite human in motion.  Something bright glints under its hood.</p><p>
  <em> “Don’t pursue this any further.  You won’t like the consequences.  Trust me.” </em>
</p><p>The voice is high and sharp, but echoes metallically, as if the speaker is at the bottom of a well or pipe.  Your eyes itch.  Something purple (<em>irrigo</em>) glitters in the distance.</p><p>You wonder for a long time after you wake up.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Clatter, a spoken word poem by Neil Hilborn.  Contains themes of differing perspectives and coping with mental illness.<br/><br/><i>“It is impossible to imagine a color you have not seen.<br/><br/>I can't call my mother because she makes me panic.<br/><br/>When I say that I'm crying, what I really mean is that I want to cry, but can't.<br/><br/>Instead of dying: the jellyfish simply ceases to move.<br/><br/>Glass moves like any other liquid but slower.<br/><br/>Sex is another way of communicating with your body, like self harm or sign language.<br/><br/>I complete five crosswords a day because it stops the panic.<br/><br/>Trucks are downshifting on main street.<br/><br/>Most of what I do, I do to stop the panic.<br/><br/>I never cry about things outside of my head because they all seem so far away.<br/><br/>Hair is partially composed of cyanide, napalm is just gasoline and plastic. I am just carbon and bad timing.<br/><br/>If i were someone else, I think I would still be mentally ill.<br/><br/>It is impossible to imagine a color you have not seen.”<i><br/><br/>This story/verse came from an interesting idea I had.  Every step of the Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name storyline warns you not to continue.  And Candles/Eaten is and was something very close to a god.  There are implications.<br/><br/>Stylistically, this story owes a lot to Estee’s drifting, ethereal While Their Name’s Still Spoken.  Estee has a gift for writing ‘negative space’.  I can only take inspiration.</i></i></p></blockquote></div></div>
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